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In the News!

Ralph Jimenez was awarded a Department of Commerce Gold Medal on September 26, 2017, at DOC headquarters in Washington, D.C. Jimenez was part of a National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) team that recently developed and produced X-ray movies of molecules. The team developed the research tools to make stop-action X-ray measurements of light interacting with molecules on near instantaneous time scales.

Fellow Tom Perkins has won a 2017 Governor’s Award for High-Impact Research. Perkins will receive the award from Governor John Hickenlooper at an event sponsored by the CO-LABS consortium at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science on October 5, 2017. This year’s ninth annual event will honor Colorado’s top scientists and engineers for projects having a significant impact on society.

Ana Maria Rey has been appointed a NIST Fellow as of August 21,2017 by the Acting Director of NIST. JILA is a research and training partnership between the University of Colorado and NIST, and Ana Maria is one of the several JILA Fellows who are NIST employees. Ana Maria was named a NIST Fellow in recognition of her world-leading program in quantum theory, her pioneering work in quantum many-body physics, and her continuing powerful collaborations with experimentalists at JILA, at NIST, and...

Leah Dodson won the Miller Prize at the 72nd International Symposium on Molecular Spectroscopy, held June 19–23 in Urbana, Illinois. Dodson is an NRC postdoc whose official advisor is Jun Ye, but who primarily works on molecular spectroscopy in the Mathias Weber lab. Her award-winning talk was entitled “Oxalate Formation in Titanium––Carbon Dioxide Anionic Clusters Studied by Infrared Photodissociation Spectroscopy.”

Ana Maria Rey has been named the winner of the 2017 Alexander Cruickshank Award in Atomic Physics by the Gordon Research Conferences. The award recognizes international leadership and impact in the organization’s main areas of biological, chemical, and physical sciences. It was presented to Rey by the Atomic Physics Gordon Research Conference “From Quantum Control to Tests of Fundamental Physics,” held on June 11–16 in Salve Regina University, Newport, Rhode Island. Rey was nominated by...

Dr. Stephen J. Smith, Founding Fellow of JILA, passed away on June 10, 2017, at the age of 92. He is survived by his wife of 66 years, three of his five sons, and four grandchildren.

Smith was one of seven NIST scientists who relocated to Boulder, Colorado, in 1962, to found the Joint Institute for Laboratory Astrophysics (JILA) with the University of Colorado Boulder Physics Department. The joint institute was officially launched April 13, 1962. Fifty years later, Smith...

Eric Coughln has been named winner of the 2016 Ph.D. Thesis Prize from the High Energy Phenomena and Fundamental Physics Division of the International Astronomical Union. He will receive the prize at the next IAU General Assemply, which will be held in Vienna in August 2018. Coughlin is also winner of the 2017 Dissertation Prize from the High Energy Astrophysics Division of the American Astronomical Society.

The IAU Thesis Prize consists of a grant (including airfare, one week...

May 18 was a red-letter day for Fellow Dana Anderson and employees of the company he founded, ColdQuanta. For the first time ever, ultracold 85Rb atoms soared above the Earth during an airplane flight with Anderson at the controls. The plane flew from Boulder to Fort Collins and back. University of Colorado Boulder Science Writer Trent Knoss was there and filed this exciting report from the scene...

The American Physical Society is memorializing Fellow Deborah Jin by renaming the APS Division of Atomic, Molecular and Optical Physics (DAMOP) Award for “Outstanding Doctoral Thesis Research in Atomic, Molecular, or Optical Physics." Henceforward, the award will be called the Deborah Jin Award for Outstanding Doctoral Thesis Research in Atomic, Molecular, or Optical Physics.

Christina Porter has won the 2017 Karel Urbanek Best Student Paper Award. The award consists of a wall plaque, honorarium, and trophy. The award was presented on Thursday March 2, 2017, at this year's Metrology, Inspection, and Process Control for Microlithography conference at the SPIE Advanced LIthography in San Jose, California. The award is sponsored by KLA-Tencor.

Margaret Murnane has been awarded the 2017 Optical Society of America’s (OSA’s) Frederic Ives Medal/Quinn Prize. The award recognizes overall distinction in optics and is the highest award given by OSA. The award was given to Murnane “for pioneering and sustained contributions to ultrafast science ranging from femtosecond lasers to soft x-ray high-harmonic generation to attosecond studies of atoms, molecules, and surfaces.”

Ralph Jimenez received a Department of Commerce Bronze Medal for Superior Federal Service at a ceremony held in mid-December 2016. The Medal is the highest honor presented by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). Under Secretary of Commerce for Standards and Technology and NIST Director Willie E. May presided over the awards ceremony, which was held concurrently at NIST's Gaithersburg, Maryland, and Boulder, Colorado, campuses.

Deborah Jin and Katharine Gebbie are two of 10 prominent scientists featured in "Gone in 2016: Notable Women in Science and Technology" written by Maia Weinstock. The article appeared online in Scientific American blogs on December 28, 2016. Jin, who died on September 15, 2016 at age 47, was a visionary researcher in ultracold atomic physics. Gebbie, who died...

Markus Raschke has been given a Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel Research Award by the Humboldt Foundation. The award is given in recognition of lifetime achievements in research. Award winners are invited to conduct reseach projects of their choice in cooperation with colleagues in Germany, with the goal of promoting international scientific cooperation. The Humboldt Foundation annually grants about 20 of these awards, which are valued at 45,000 Euros. Award winners are invited to...

Markus Raschke has been elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), according to an AAAS news release published on the web on November 21, 2016. Former JILAn Steven Cundiff was also elected a Fellow of the AAAS this year.

The new Fellows are among the 391 AAAS members elected Fellows by their peers. The honor recognizes distinguished efforts to advance science, either scientifically or socially. The new 391 Fellows elected in October 2016 were...

Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) education just got a big boost from a new iPad App developed by the PhET Interactive Simulations project at the University of Colorado. The 99¢ App is an extension of the award-winning collection of computer simulations of topics in science and mathematics produced by the project.

The project was founded in 2002 by former JILAn and Nobel Laureate Carl Wieman, who obtained funding for it from his own Nobel Prize,...

The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences has just published a profile of Fellow Henry Kapteyn, a recently elected member of the National Academy of Sciences. The profile presents highlights of Kapteyn's life as well as his long and productive career in developing ultrashort-wavelength lasers, including table-top x-ray lasers. Many of Kapteyn's achievements occurred during a long and fruitful collaboration...

The magazine showcases Popmintchev’s accomplishments at JILA as a laser physicist, including his having played a key role in the invention of the world’s first tabletop x-ray laser. The magazine dubbed this...

Fellows Jun Ye and Deborah Jin (1968–2016) have been named Highly Cited Researchers for 2016 by Thomson Reuters. Highly Cited Researchers is an annual list that recognizes leading researchers from around the world based on an analysis of their research publications The 2016 list recognizes the most-cited authors of research publications in the period 2004 through 2014. Ye and Jin are two of 110 people in the physics category in this year's list.

Deborah Jin passed away September 15, 2016, after a courageous battle with cancer. She was 47. Jin was an internationally renowned physicist and Fellow with the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST); Professor Adjunct in the Department of Physics at the University of Colorado Boulder, and a Fellow of JILA, a...

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JILA is a joint physics institute of the University of Colorado at Boulder and the National Institute of Standards and Technology. We support an eclectic and innovative research program that fosters creative collaborations among our scientists. Collaborations play a key role in the pioneering research JILA and the JILA Physics Frontier Center are known for around the world. To learn more, visit our About JILA page.